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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26307361">Dearer for its Mystery</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux'>reine_des_corbeaux</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Accidental Voyeurism, Boarding School, Caning, Hand Jobs, Interwar Period, Jealousy, M/M, Sibling Incest, complicated family dynamics</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 10:09:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,957</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26307361</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>David Melville doesn't really get on with his younger brother Alexander. But things may change when he finds out about Alexander's extracurricular pursuits.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Uptight Boys' School Prefect/Brother With a Reputation For Promiscuity</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>RelationShipping 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Dearer for its Mystery</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts">havisham</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
David Melville had stopped on his way back to his study to talk with an acquaintance on the staircase to the dormitory when he saw his brother coming towards him, arms linked with Welch. 
</p><p>
	“Excuse me,” he said to Mellenby, who had been rather ardently arguing for the school’s need to resist seditious calls for amateur theatrics and focus its less scholastic efforts on cricket lest a dire fate befall it, and thus, England, “I have to talk to your brother.” 
</p><p>
Mellenby, who disturbed the dust motes floating in the air about him as he finished a last gesticulation, gave David an understanding nod, which was really all he needed. Leaving his position leaned against the railings (a particular privilege he’d taken great pleasure in since being made prefect), David stalked over towards his brother, who was laughing with his head thrown back at something Welch had said. This struck David as rather odd, since, while he wasn’t particularly close with Welch, he had gathered the boy had something of a reputation for good-natured dimness, and while Alexander Melville tolerated many things, bores did not tend to be one of them. This, he often said, was why he couldn’t bear to spend any more time than necessary with his elder brother. 
</p><p>
	“Melville Minor,” David called in the particularly strident voice he generally used to call younger students into line, “a word.” 
</p><p>
	Alexander, the eponymous Melville Minor, rolled his grey eyes and flicked his hair out of his eyes. It had gotten long over the holiday, too long in David’s eyes and in the eyes of the school. But the soft flop of brown hair suited him, even if it made him look far too untidy for David’s comfort. He would have to tell him off for it though, even if it pained David to order Alexander to have it cut. 
</p><p>
	“Oh, Davy,” Alexander said, “must you call me Melville Minor? I’m your brother.” 
</p><p>
	“And I’m trying to set an example for the younger students, Melville Minor. An example you appear fully prepared to flout, given your unseemly conduct.” 
</p><p>
	Alexander raised an eyebrow. “Unseemly conduct? It’s just Welch. He’s in our house. I’m breaking no rules, but if you insist on using me as an excuse to keep away from Mellenby’s more tedious opinions on sport, far be it from to protest. It’s just I’ve an awfully busy day today and I suppose you have, oh, I don’t know, prefect-y things to be doing.” 
</p><p>
	David did, in fact, have duties to attend to, but they mostly involved a start-of-term meeting with his fellow prefects, and it was, at this point, more or less going to be old hat. He was nearly eighteen, after all, and this was to be his last year at school and his last year as a prefect. It was up to David to be impeccable now, for the sake of the Melvilles, even in such lowered states as they were now, and for the sake of himself. Already he imagined it, himself as a Cambridge man, proud and forthright in the tradition of his father. Geoffrey, after all, hadn’t gotten to be a university man, and David would carry on the legacy in his place. All that he needed now was for Alexander to behave. Unfortunately, Alexander seemed less than keen on the whole idea, and even now had his arms crossed and looked nearly ready to begin tapping his foot against the polished wood floor. 
</p><p>
	“Any more nonsense from you and I’ll cane you. I don’t care if you’re my brother,” David hissed. It was perhaps more aggressive than was truly appropriate, but Alexander was his brother. He felt he had leeway. “This is, as you so eloquently stated, a ‘prefect-y thing’, anyhow.” 
</p><p>
	“Yes sir!” Alexander chirped, making a mocking military salute and dashing back to Welch before David could berate him for mockery of His Majesty’s troops and the glorious dead of the Great War, Geoffrey included. 
</p><p>
	David slunk uncomfortably back to Mellenby.
</p><p>
	“You really ought to be sterner with him. He’ll run rings around you otherwise. Lower formers always do,” Mellenby declared with the stolid decidedness of one already set in their opinions.
</p><p>
	“I know, but he is my brother,” David said. Mellenby shook his head. 
</p><p>
	“More’s the pity. Now, about the fourth form’s petition for a play, I think it’s unpatriotic. You'll talk to Mr. Rose about it, won’t you? Have a stop put to it.” 
</p><p>
	David let Mellenby’s ramblings wash over him, and tried not to think too hard about Alexander. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	The prefect’s meeting was utterly dull, perhaps unavoidably so. Rose, the housemaster, was a thin, tiresome man with bags under his eyes and little love for schoolboys, and he wished to have everything cleared away as soon as possible. He left the room after barely ten minutes, mumbling about leaving decisions in their capable hands. Rose was, in general, a mumbler. David and Hughes, the new prefect, looked at each other for long minutes before Hughes cleared his throat. 
</p><p>
	“How were your holidays, Melville?” 
</p><p>
	“Oh, fine, really. My family went to the seaside. My brother was ill and my sister and my father had a pretty terrific row, but it’s all blown over now.” 
</p><p>
	“Really?” Hughes’s eyes seemed to light up, and Melville remembered rumours he’d heard about Hughes’s little cottage industry of salacious gossip. 
</p><p>
	“Yes. Nothing concerning.” 
</p><p>
	He’d only heard bits and pieces of it through the wall as he fell asleep: Helen’s raised voice, their father shouting, the meek susurrations of their mother’s voice as she attempted to make peace. And Alexander had looked at David. When their eyes met in the dimness, Alexander had an unknowable expression on his face, at once guarded and excited. It had reminded David of Geoffrey’s, on the day Geoffrey left for a war from which he would not return, and he’d stared into Alexander’s eyes for far too long while a vase shattered against the floor on the other side of the wall. But Hughes didn’t need to know any of that. 
</p><p>
	“Oh,” Hughes said unhappily. “I thought it would’ve had something to do with your brother. Of course, he is very discreet, but I was wondering if your sister knew.” 
</p><p>
	David had absolutely no idea what Hughes was talking about. What Alexander did with his time was Alexander’s business, so long as he wasn’t bothersome to others and behaved in a generally upright manner. Geoffrey had never nosed his way into David’s life when he was old enough to, and therefore, David would never do the same to Alexander. It was simply good, common decency to do unto others as you’d have done unto yourself. 
</p><p>
	“What’s Alexander done now?” David asked. “Is he cribbing again? I’ve told him I’ll cane him for it myself if he does.” 
</p><p>
	“You don’t know?” 
</p><p>
	“I know he’s cribbed in the past, and he broke a window with a stolen cricket ball last term, but has he done something else?” 
</p><p>
	Hughes had a pitying look on his face, staring down his nose at David. 
</p><p>
	“Melville, I mean this in the kindest way possible, but your brother’s been a veritable tart for half the house and quite possibly half the school.” 
</p><p>
	“That,” David said, “is ridiculous. Do you really think I wouldn’t know what my own brother was doing with his time?” 
</p><p>
	“Have you ever come across him at night?” Hughes asked. 
</p><p>
	“No, because I sleep at night. As you should too,” David snapped. “You’re a prefect now, Hughes. Set an example.” 
</p><p>
	“Like you set for your brother?” 
</p><p>
	Someday, David really was going to thrash Hughes. He thought, rather vindictively, that he’d never much liked the other boy, and any warm feelings he might still harbour towards him were cooling rapidly. He found himself wishing for Mellenby’s discourses on cricket, or Alexander’s long-winded explanations of the popular novels he hid under his mattress. Anything but Hughes’ revelations. 
</p><p>
	“I do my best to set an example for my brother, but if he doesn’t follow it, I can only do so much.” 
</p><p>
	“Well, if you’d like to get at him, try the boathouse or the music room.” Hughes shrugged. “I wouldn’t have told you, but now that I’m a prefect, thought it was my duty. Oh, and it’s a bit beastly of me to say this, I know, but it’s not as if he’s just keeping it to the house. I saw him with someone from another house two days ago, heading for the music room.” 
</p><p>
	David made up his mind. 
</p><p>
	“Thank you for telling me,” he said to Hughes, who smiled thinly. 
</p><p>
	They stood, and they left the room together. In the common room, Alexander lay sprawled across a chair, the first two buttons of his shirt undone, twiddling a pen between two fingers. His hair was still in disarray, but he smiled at his brother, and David tried not to look down the pale line of his neck to where it disappeared beneath his shirt. David’s heart did a funny little jump in his chest, and he nodded at his brother. Better than having to talk to him. 
</p><p>
	That night, he dreamed of hands on Alexander’s bare shoulders and woke filled with guilt and shame. <em>Alexander is your brother, </em>David told himself. But he’d had these dreams before, and he knew that he would again. The cold of the showers in the morning worked well enough to drown them out, but even so, a biliousness rose in his throat as he ate his breakfast next to his brother. 
</p><p>
	“Davy?” Alexander asked, his mouth full of porridge, looking distinctly unseductive. “Are you alright? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.” 
</p><p>
	There was a bruise on Alexander’s neck, half hidden by his shirt collar and plausibly from games, but David could only assign sinister meaning to it, imagining lips against his brother’s throat. 
</p><p>
	“Yes,” he said, a little dully. Alexander went back to his porridge, smiling. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	David watched his brother’s progress for the next two days, following him carefully across the school, through sunlit well-scrubbed halls and the darker corridors between the studies. Classes, at least, kept them somewhat separated, but even so, he’d see Alexander in the hallways, always with an arm around some boy or other, always laughing with his head thrown back, one hand gesturing in the air. Against his better judgement, David did have to admit that his brother had fascinating hands, long and thin-fingered, disturbing fragments of light and dust motes whenever he moved them. But that was not the reason for which he watched Alexander. Instead, he paid attention to the boys with him, and once came up behind Alexander in the hallway to hear him whispering the ear of a boy David knew was not in their house. 
</p><p>
	“Midnight, in the boathouse,” Alexander whispered. “And you’ll bring the grammar exercises?” 
</p><p>
	“And my tuckbox,” the other boy said.
</p><p>
	“Good lad.” 
</p><p>
	David drew back, letting a swarm of first formers come between him and his brother. He would be at the boathouse at midnight too, he decided. He’d even take his cane with him. And so he did, setting out well after dark across the fields with cane and torch, sneaking quietly so as not to disturb the masters or the other boys. The moon above was very large and very full, a yellowy autumnal color as it shone down onto David, and by its light, he easily reached the boathouse. 
</p><p>
	Stopping for a moment, he leaned against the cold wood of the door and wondered just what exactly he was doing. Geoffrey would never have chased after Alexander like this, David thought, but Geoffrey had a fiancee as well, a dull, pretty girl he’d planned to marry after the war. He didn’t dream of his brothers in ways he definitely shouldn’t. And Geoffrey was dead anyhow, dead and buried in some muddy field in France. It was time for David to step out of Geoffrey’s ghostly shoes and into his own. He was not his own older brother, but he was Alexander’s. He pushed open the door. 
</p><p>
	The sight that greeted him was one of utter disarray. A half-eaten iced bun lay on the little table by the door, and soft giggling came from the back wall. David beamed his torch, only to see a half-clothed body, and, impossibly, Alexander pressed against the wall by the boy in front of him. He was laughing, just as he always laughed. There was icing sugar from the bun stuck to his nose, and when the torch beam fell upon him, he paled. 
</p><p>
	“Who’s there!” Alexander called. “Davy?” 
</p><p>
	“That is Melville Major to you,” David said in his best prefect’s voice. “Come into the light. You, whoever you are, come too.” 
</p><p>
	The other boy was, predictably, the boy from the corridor earlier that day, wearing slightly more clothing than Alexander, and anxiously hitching up his trousers. His spectacles were askew, and David hated him on sight. 
</p><p>
	“You, whoever you are, get out. What house do you live in?” 
</p><p>
	The boy was already retreating, but he called back to David even as he retreated. 
</p><p>
	“Pendle!” 
</p><p>
	“I’ll be speaking to your housemaster about this,” David declared. “Now, you, Alexander, step forward.” 
</p><p>
	The boy ran, and David realized that he probably should have gotten his name. Ah, well, it couldn’t be helped. And as it was, he had to deal with his brother before all else. Alexander looked down at his bare feet, and David stepped squarely into his vision. 
</p><p>
	“Well? What do you have to say for yourself?” 
</p><p>
	“Nothing,” Alexander said. “You saw everything, and you’re going to get me expelled, even though Mother doesn’t need another heartbreak after Geoffrey, and Father will probably have apoplexy.” 
</p><p>
	“And whose fault will that be?” 
</p><p>
	“Yours, because you told them,” Alexander snapped. “Now, aren’t you going to cane me and get this over with, the way you’ve always promised you would.” 
</p><p>
	“You sound as though you want that,” David said. Realization was dawning-- memories of gentle touches whenever their family seemed to be imploding, the ways Alexander seemed to flaunt his partnerships beneath his brother’s nose. It was, in a way, slowly beginning to make an awful sort of sense. 
</p><p>
	“I have,” Alexander said, and he kissed him. 
</p><p>
	His mouth tasted of icing sugar, and he kissed far better than David had ever dreamed a person could. But David still had some integrity. He shoved Alexander away, sending him skidding backwards. 
</p><p>
	“You’re my brother!” he cried. 
</p><p>
	“And?” Alexander said. “Cane me for it. I just want to touch you, really, and it’ll be worth it.” 
</p><p>
	“Fine,” David said, and imagined Geoffrey’s ghost frowning at him for unsportsmanlike conduct. He found that he didn’t particularly care. “Hands against the wall.” 
</p><p>
	In the fantasies he didn’t like to admit, David pictured himself caning Alexander in his study, where he’d watch him whimper against the desk and squirm beneath the harsh blows of the rattan cane. It would, he was certain, feel good to be in control. And Alexander would look so well with his arse all reddened and bright. But instead, they were in the boathouse, and Alexander leaned against the wall in the thin light of the torch. David hefted the cane in his hand and let it swing. Alexander gasped when it connected to his flesh. 
</p><p>
	“How many?” His voice was strained. 
</p><p>
	“Twelve, I think,” David said, fingering the cane. He let it fall again, and this time Alexander whimpered. The sound was enough to get David straining towards hardness even as he raised the cane again, bringing it down hard against Alexander. 
</p><p>
	He lost count at some point, his arm aching, and Alexander wailed. But he was too beautiful like this, his arse crisscrossed with red stripes, every strike bringing new and delightful sounds to his lips. David didn’t want to stop, and his trousers were growing ever more uncomfortably tight, but he was a gentleman and had promised Alexander only twelve, so he did halt at last. David panted, hands on his knees, as Alexander turned to look at him. 
</p><p>
	“You really are fierce,” he said to his brother. “And you clearly need some help. 
</p><p>
	Before David could do anything, Alexander was before him, undoing the flies of his trousers with practiced hands. David did not particularly want to think about where those hands had practiced, but he was willing to let his brother reach in and take out his cock. In this, Alexander’s hands were practiced too, even if the sensation of a hand besides his own upon his cock was utterly unfamiliar to David. But Alexander still stroked and pulled at him gently, and when David looked down, he could see that Alexander’s hastily pulled-up trousers, too, seemed to strain. 
</p><p>
	Alexander didn’t talk much as he continued to pull and stroke at David’s cock, but his hands said enough, and David’s thoughts danced and spun wildly in his brain, before all sensation focused in his groin and he came in spurts across his brother’s hand. In the hazy fog that followed his orgasm, he expected that Alexander might wipe his hand across David’s shirt, but instead, he brought it to his mouth, and smiled slyly at David as he licked his fingers clean. 
</p><p>
	“I’ve always wanted to do that, wanted you,” Alexander said at last. 
</p><p>
	“And I you,” David admitted. There should probably have been a Shakespeare quote there, or a declaration of undying love, but instead there was just this moment, just these stumbling words. “Would you like my help?” 
</p><p>
	He glanced down at Alexander’s trousers, which looked perilously close to falling down. 
</p><p>
	“You know,” Alexander said at last, “I think I would.” 
</p><p>
	And in the darkness of the boathouse, he smiled. 
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Helpful works for researching this included <i>The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the English Public School</i>, <i>Flanneled Fool</i>, the school sections of <i>Goodbye to All That</i>, and <i>The Poisoned Bowl: Sex and the Public School</i>. However, this is as much, if not more, an effort of shameless pastiche as it is of historical research. Of particular use on that front were <i>Another Country</i>, <i>David Blaize</i>, <i>Tell England</i>, and the undeniably Victorian but nevertheless entertaining <i>The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's</i>.</p><p>Title from Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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